Raiblocks Cryptocurrency Rebrands as Nano as Coin's Price Soars

Bye blockchain, hello block lattice.

It’s been a rough day and a rougher week for cryptocurrency, but one coin is taking a drastic step to change its fortunes. The team behind the cryptocurrency Raiblocks announced Wednesday that the coin is officially rebranding itself as Nano, and the early returns for the coin are promising.

The cryptocurrency is the 20th largest in the world according to CoinMarketCap, with a $2.6 billion market cap. The coin’s price is up to about $20, up from a recent low of $13 on January 29. That isn’t the coin’s all-time high, as it reached as high as $33 in early January amid the general cryptocurrency boom, but it’s one of relatively few coins that has shown signs of recovery amid the general downturn.

The big idea behind what is now Nano is the block lattice, a variation on the blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. The tech is a direct reaction to a central problem with bitcoin, which is that its ever-expanding digital ledger makes transaction times painfully slow and consumes infamously large amounts of power. Nano gives each account key its own distinct blockchain that then replicates to other peers on the network. This speeds up processing times and reduces energy needs.

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This smaller-scale, networked approach is part of the reason the team says they made the shift to the new name — along with the fact nobody could quite agree how to pronounce “Raiblocks.”

“The Core Team wanted a name that represented the simplicity and speed of the project, and Nano does just that,” the team writes in a Medium post [announcing the move]. The new logo uses several nodes, playing on the block-lattice design of the network, that connect to form an ‘N.’”

The team assured users that the switchover would be seamless, with all funds, wallets, and transactions expected to continue operating normally. The team also promised the introduction of a desktop and ioS mobile wallet later in 2018. The coin has also been added to new exchanges like Kucoin and Bit-Z, fueling general optimism for the relaunched cryptocurrency.

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